1,272 research outputs found

    Dominant Search Engines: An Essential Cultural & Political Facility

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    When American lawyers talk about essential facilities, they are usually referring to antitrust doctrine that has required certain platforms to provide access on fair and nondiscriminatory terms to all comers. Some have recently characterized Google as an essential facility. Antitrust law may shape the search engine industry in positive ways. However, scholars and activists must move beyond the crabbed vocabulary of competition policy to develop a richer normative critique of search engine dominance. In this chapter, I sketch a new concept of essential cultural and political facility, which can help policymakers recognize and address situations where a bottleneck has become important enough that special scrutiny is warranted. This scrutiny may not always culminate in regulation. However, it clearly suggests a need for publicly funded alternatives to the concentrated conduits and content providers colonizing the web

    Should We Kill the Dinosaurs or Will They Die of Natural Causes

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    Beyond cute: exploring user types and design opportunities of virtual reality pet games

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    Virtual pet games, such as handheld games like Tamagotchi or video games like Petz, provide players with artificial pet companions or entertaining pet-raising simulations. Prior research has found that virtual pets have the potential to promote learning, collaboration, and empathy among users. While virtual reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular game medium, litle is known about users' expectations regarding game avatars, gameplay, and environments for VR-enabled pet games. We surveyed 780 respondents in an online survey and interviewed 30 participants to understand users' motivation, preferences, and game behavior in pet games played on various medium, and their expectations for VR pet games. Based on our findings, we generated three user types that reflect users' preferences and gameplay styles in VR pet games. We use these types to highlight key design opportunities and recommendations for VR pet games

    NTN Communications v. Interactive Network: Denial of Copyright and Trademark Protection for Interactive Games

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    A Modern Copyright Framework for the Internet of Things (IoT): Intellectual Property Scholars\u27 Joint Submission to the Canadian Government Consultation

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    In response to the Canadian government consultation process on the modernization of the copyright framework launched in the summer 2021, we hereby present our analysis and recommendations concerning the interaction between copyright and the Internet of Things (IoT). The recommendations herein reflect the shared opinion of the intellectual property scholars who are signatories to this brief. They are informed by many combined decades of study, teaching, and practice in Canadian, US, and international intellectual property law.In what follows, we explain:•The importance of approaching the questions raised in the consultation with a firm commitment to maintaining the appropriate balance of rights and interests in Canada’s copyright system, within the broader framework of the Constitution;•That the modernization of the Copyright Act requires a careful examination of the copyright framework within larger observable trends of dominant positions in the marketplace and anti-competitive practices, of the extraction of big (personal) data, and of market and legal infrastructures’ heavy reliance on non-negotiated standard form contracts;-That the growing prevalence of the IoT shows more clearly than ever before why Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) need to be recalibrated in keeping with the objectives of copyright, the Constitution, property rights, and of promoting competitive markets.As such, we recommend:-To narrow the scope of the TPM prohibitions under the Copyright Act, whereby the circumvention of access controls or copy controls for non-copyright-infringing purposes would be lawful, with a non-exhaustive list of such purposes to provide greater legal certainty. The same treatment would apply to the dealing in TPM circumvention technology enabling the exercise of non-copyright-infringing purposes.In the alternative, the Copyright Act should be amended to:-Introduce a new exception that would confirm that the TPM provisions (and other relevant exclusive rights in the Copyright Act) do not apply to the right to repair, including for maintenance and diagnostics purposes.-Introduce a new exception to encourage follow-on innovation.-Additionally, just as copyright holders should not be allowed to contract out of exceptions to copyright infringement through non-negotiated standard form agreements, neither should they be allowed to opt out of exceptions to TPM prohibitions by contract

    The Basics Matter: At the Periphery of Intellectual Property

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    Controversies often arise at the interfaces where intellectual property ( IP ) law meets other topics in law and economics, such as property law, contract law, and antitrust law. Participants in the debates over how to mediate these interfaces often view each interface as a special case deserving unique treatment under the law. The doctrines of copyright and patent misuse are cases in point: they graft select antitrust principles onto copyright or patent law, even though there is an entirely distinct body of law - antitrust law - designed to deal with the putative concerns about competition that allegedly give rise to misuse. In this essay, we argue that a better approach for mediating disputes at the periphery of IP law focuses on what we term the basics - or core principles and features - of each area of law, and rarely requires specialized frameworks. For example, according to our basics matter approach, there is no need to create special doctrines or approaches to address issues relating to matters such as price discrimination or restrictive licensing arrangements involving IP. Rather, analyzing the legality of such arrangements simply requires one to look to the basics of substantive IP law, antitrust law, and what some people call the general law - property law, contract law, and the like. Applying the basics of each area of the law gives us a workable - and more predictable - framework of analysis than creating one - with more specialized approaches, such as the doctrines of copyright or patent misuse, using the basics results in easier to apply rules for resolving disputes that transacting parties can better understand and rely on in advance. By reducing legal uncertainty, the basics matter approach facilitates the ex ante coordination necessary to promote innovation through the commercialization of the inventions, symbols, and creative works that are protected by patents, copyrights, and trademarks - the entire goal of IP law and an important goal of antitrust law

    Mixed-Initiative Creative Interfaces

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    Enabled by artificial intelligence techniques, we are witnessing the rise of a new paradigm of computational creativity support: mixed-initiative creative interfaces put human and computer in a tight interactive loop where each suggests, produces, evaluates, modifies, and selects creative outputs in response to the other. This paradigm could broaden and amplify creative capacity for all, but has so far remained mostly confined to artificial intelligence for game content generation, and faces many unsolved interaction design challenges. This workshop therefore convenes CHI and game researchers to advance mixed-initiative approaches to creativity support

    Freedom to Hack

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    Swaths of personal and nonpersonal information collected online about internet users are increasingly being used in sophisticated ways to manipulate them based on that information. This represents a new trend in the exploitation of data, where instead of pursuing direct financial gain based on the face value of the data, actors are seeking to engage in data analytics using advanced artificial intelligence technologies that would allow them to more easily access individuals’ cognition and future behavior. Although in recent years the concept of online manipulation has received some academic and policy attention, the desirable relationship between the data-breach law and online manipulation is not yet well-appreciated. In other words, regulators and courts are yet to realize the power of existing legal mechanisms pertaining to data breaches in mitigating the harm of online manipulation. This Article provides an account of this relationship, by looking at online manipulation achieved through psychographic profiling. It submits that the volume, efficacy, and sophistication of present online manipulation techniques pose a considerable and immediate danger to autonomy, privacy, and democracy. Internet actors, political entities, and foreign adversaries fastidiously study the personality traits and vulnerabilities of potential voters and, increasingly, target each such voter with an individually tailored stream of information or misinformation with the intent of exploiting the weaknesses of these individuals. While new norms and regulations will have to be enacted at a certain point to address the problem of manipulation, data-breach law could provide a much-needed backdrop for the challenges presented by online manipulation, while alleviating the sense of lawlessness engulfing current misuses of personal and nonpersonal data. At the heart of this Article is the inquiry of data-breach law’s ability to recognize the full breadth of potential misuse of breached personal information, which today includes manipulation for political purposes. At present, data-breach jurisprudence does very little to recognize its evolving role in regulating misuses of personal information by unauthorized parties. It is a jurisprudence that is partially based on a narrow approach that seeks to remedy materialized harm in the context of identity theft or fraud. This approach contravenes the purpose of data-breach law – to protect individuals from the externalities of certain cyber risks by bridging informational asymmetries between corporations and consumers. This Article develops the theoretical connection between data-breach law and online manipulation, providing for a meaningful regulatory solution that is not currently used to its full extent

    Should We Kill the Dinosaurs or Will They Die of Natural Causes

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    The Best Laid Plans: How DMCA sec. 1201 Went Awry, Smothering Competition and Creating Giants,and Where We Go Now

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    In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with the express intention of protecting the intellectual property of copyright holders from the growing threats of digital piracy and information sharing brought about by an increasingly digital society. Among the law’s many provisions is §1201, which works to prohibit circumnavigation of digital protections copyright holders may put on protected works—in essence, innovators or competitors would be unable to develop technology or programs to bypass security measures put into place by primary creators. While this provision seems facially reasonable, it has effectively served as a means to quash adversarial interoperability. Adversarial interoperability is the development of a product intended to interact with or function alongside another, without that creator’s permission. This practice of interoperability allowed many of today’s tech giants to reach their current heights, and these measures taken to stop those practices only serve to maintain the status quo. Without meaningful challenges through adversarial interoperability, giants like Facebook are under very little threat from would-be competitors, and consequently, feel very little pressure to make systemic changes which could benefit the common consumer. The status quo allows dominant players to buy out potential competition, and many investors are hesitant to put money on a horse racing against an established power. This paper looks at the history of interoperability and how §1201 serves to protect the interests of already powerful players in the tech space, and looks at advantages and disadvantages to expanded use of adversarial interoperability. It also examines potential avenues for moving forward by looking at the French example of a law that aims in the right direction, but does not pack powerful enough a punch to make a lasting difference. In the end, this paper advocates for a change of course in how America deals with adversarial interoperability and competition. America should reverse its position and legitimize interoperability as a foundational tool in the entrepreneurial economic system it purports to champion
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